The Survivor
by RobinRocks
Summary: When you're walking over bones you have to get some good out of it, convince yourself that it wasn't all for nothing. One-shot for Remembrance Day.


I didn't have any particular nation/character in mind when I wrote this. Which is more or less the point.

For Remembrance Day - 11/11/13

The Survivor

The sun hangs red and damp like a skinned peach, aglow in the ash. This is the very end of the world, or something like it - or maybe that's what he would believe if he didn't have the history of it under his skin like blind tattoos, endless inks that wrap around his wrists and throat.

What does he know of the universe but this?

The year is 1917 but it doesn't have to be because this isn't exclusive. The carnage is chemical, mechanical, splattered with oil and the grease between gears - that's something new but the intention isn't. All they did was make it easier, like factory lines, with little exertion. Mankind ever strives toward perfection and perhaps they're beginning to get close; and one day they'll wipe themselves out completely without an ounce of sweat.

Too bad it can't be bottled. It'd make a fine display for the next World's Fair, on purple velvet out in the ether between the fragments of bone and chunks of earth that once had borders.

And _of _the earth, well, he wouldn't like to say he's never seen mud like it, that wouldn't strictly be the truth, because boots and hooves and machinery have that sort of effect, you know, and it can't be helped. It has that damp-grit smell, low in the nose, and then the blood gets in with it and there's no helping it, it clings like smoke, ever-present, the language of war.

He takes stock. This is always his job because he's always the only one left; or, at least, the only one with any sense about him when it's over. And anyway, it might be said that he's not really a man - and this is No Man's Land, after all.

Man's theatre is truly remarkable - and the decor well-researched, painstaking in its detail, with the groans of the dying for the overture and the frilled peals of barbed wire for the curtain call. They fashion morning mist from the smoke, fireflies from the smouldering ends of last cigarettes, cage-armed creatures from the husks of trees. He is in awe of their making of Hell.

The air is still heavy with the echo of gunfire, lying in the lungs like thunder, it sounds like it will never be silent again. He should know how long it takes for battlefields to fall quiet, reclaimed by grass and wildflowers, the earth opened and ripe, fermenting. When it's like this there's no telling what part of the world you're in, blotted out with bodies, it all goes back to dust in the end and maybe they should just let the poppies bloom thickly over the borders, bursting seeds between the words used to wage war.

He walks. Back in the trench there will be an order, no doubt, or perhaps a phone call. They like to pretend there is some semblance of clarity, after all. Of course there's some sort of _plan _to all this, even though it doesn't feel much like a cause, not in his experience, really more like a necessity or an instinct. Humans are resourceful and inventive and that's half the problem; they wouldn't be able to get away with it otherwise.

He had a rifle, he thinks. He'll have to put in for a new one - or else prise one from a cold hand, though it'll likely be battered, maybe flooded, and it might jam when he needs it most. Best to be safe, then. They'll replace the men, naturally. He sees no reason why they can't replace the guns-

And, well, maybe his boots, they've had holes in them for months, they let in the stale water and the bullet casings glinting like coins, cold in the filth, sent to their purpose and spent.

But here's the thing: it's easy enough to talk about it like this, to throw pretty words around like the poets do and colour it with the pallid shades of romance. Frankly he doesn't have anything better to do than to allow it to flower in his mind as though it's really _worth _something. When you're walking over bones you have to get some good out of it, convince yourself that it wasn't all for nothing. This is the gloating in the aftermath, the kind of gloating that he's used to because he's always left behind, the one stain that won't come away in the rinse.

Tomorrow will have the same sour smell and the same skinned sun and he can put out his open hands for the snowflake-ash. He can be poetic about it then too if he wants, waiting in its weightlessness.

He knows war well enough by now to make it a masterpiece, such is the sin of surviving.


End file.
